Group calls for probe of Prop EE donations

OCEANSIDE  A North County taxpayer advocacy group has asked the San Diego district attorney’s office to investigate whether the MiraCosta College Foundation violated election laws by donating $100,000 to the campaign for Proposition EE.

Foundation Executive Director Linda Fogerson said she doesn’t think the complaint will get far because the nonprofit foundation was within the law to make the donation. The proposition — which failed in the Nov. 6 election — would have allowed the college district to raise $497 million for campus construction and renovation projects by selling bonds.

Steve Walker, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, confirmed Wednesday that the office had received the complaint, but could not say more about it because the person assigned to investigate it was out during the holidays.

Walker said campaign complaints sometimes are forwarded to the Fair Political Practices Commission.

FPPC spokeswoman Tara Stock said Wednesday that she was looking into whether a complaint had been received at her office but that, in general, nonprofits are not prohibited from making political contributions as long as reporting requirements are met.

Gary Gonsalves, co-founder of Stop Taxing Us, said his group filed the complaint with the district attorney’s office because the foundation’s $100,000 contribution appeared to violate the Internal Revenue Service’s restrictions on contributions from tax-exempt groups.

“Our research indicates that the use of College Foundation money for campaigning is an illegal use of deductible charity dollars,” he said in a Dec. 19 news release. “This is not just a misallocation — it is an apparent crime and we are asking the proper state and federal authorities to investigate our findings.”

Gonsalves said the $100,000 contribution represents 18 percent of the foundation’s $550,000 budget, which violates an I.R.S. provision against nontaxable groups spending a substantial part of their activities trying to influence legislation.

Fogerson said Gonsalves is wrong in his math and understanding of the law. His $550,000 figure was for fiscal year 2010-11, while the donation was made in the 2011-12 fiscal year, when the foundation’s expense budget was $885,000.

But even if the donation had been made earlier, Fogerson said it still would have been legal because the amount was below what’s allowed by the I.R.S., which restricts such donations to 20 percent of the of the first $500,000 of their budgets classified as exempt purpose expenditures.

Under that restriction, Forgerson said, the foundation could have legally donated up to $157,750 to the campaign.

Gonsalves said her explanation raises even more questions. Why did the foundation’s budget jump more than $300,000 in one year, he asked, and were builders who would have benefited from Prop. EE among the donors?

Fogerson said the budget did not suddenly increase because builders started donating last year, but rather has steadily increased over the past seven years because the foundation hired a professional fundraiser,

She acknowledge some donations are from people in the building industry, but said it is wrong to infer the contributions were made specifically to promote Prop. EE.